


Nova

by eyemoji



Series: There Shall Be a Fire [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Annihilation AU, Oops, i told myself i wasn't going to write anymore fanfiction but here i am, i've actually written some chapters ahead so this might actually update regularly we'll see, southern reach trilogy au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 21:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17129243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyemoji/pseuds/eyemoji
Summary: Our mission itself, as it had been told to us, was quite vague: Explore the living biological anomaly off of the south coast of Florida, a mysterious stretch of land referred to in official capacity asArea X.





	Nova

**Author's Note:**

> southern reach au. if you don't like first person, give it a whirl anyways; there will be rotating perspectives and POVs.

AREA X.

 

_ This mission is my everything. _

 

I didn’t fully realize this until I stared at the hole in the ground, the unending array of spiral stairs carving further and further into the ground just inches shy of our feet. The pitch black of the hole (tunnel? cave?) gazed unruffled back at me, its ceaseless existence a silent challenge of my authority as expedition leader.

 

I am not afraid of heights, but out of some unknown inspiration-- perhaps the desire to protect my crew, perhaps the training we had been given before we had set out just three days prior-- I grabbed the hand of the member of our group closest to the edge, the man we had somewhat affectionately named the “communications” officer, and pulled him back towards something resembling relative safety. The resulting complaints were worth the overwhelming relief I felt from moving us all even just two extra feet away from the lip of the hole.

 

Our group, my crew, was not a large one; we had only four members: the psychologist, a man bald as the full moon, who often muttered under his breath and kept to himself, leaving the rest of us wondering what we might discover if one of us had taken on his particular field of study; the afore-mentioned “communications” specialist, in reality a biologist with a vague dabbling in linguistics as well as a wealth of knowledge where pop culture was involved; the anthropologist, a woman who, maybe ironically, was not quite so human herself; and myself: the surveyor and official commander of our expedition. 

I would give you our names, but I must admit this is one of the times where I agree wholeheartedly with the original directive given to us. Using our names, the researchers had theorized, would provide us with too much of an attachment to the Outside World. It had been one of their many attempts to keep us as unbiased as possible. I did eventually, from one way or another, learn all of my crew’s identities, but I think that providing them here will be of no effect on the narrative, and so I will not divulge them at this point.

 

Our mission itself, as it had been told to us, was quite vague: Explore the living biological anomaly off of the south coast of Florida, a mysterious stretch of land referred to in official capacity as  _ Area X. _

 

To the unknowing eye, Area X would seem like just another stretch of Floridian wilderness-- part of the Everglades, maybe. Especially lush compared to most, perhaps, but...not necessarily out of the ordinary. Except, of course, that the majority of the flora and fauna had appeared out of nowhere, and though part of the enclosed area had once been populated by a coastal town or two, none of it remained, at least to the knowledge of anyone residing outside of it. This was, in effect, part of our mission. If the town still existed, somewhere within the vegetation’s depths, the mission directors would want to know about it. So far, as we’d hacked our way through overgrown paths and trudged along breathtaking natural walkways, not too weary to appreciate their splendor, we’d seen nothing, though the maps we’d been given indicated that at the very least, a lighthouse remained, structurally sound enough to be documented by previous researchers.

 

“Is that where we’re heading?” the anthropologist had inquired earlier, her tone deceptively polite. Not that she had ever been rude, but… there was something about her that frightened me, if I was being honest, and so I was always on edge around her, even as I briskly answered with something noncommittal. It wasn’t fair to her, to be sure, but…

 

I tried not to think about it, and, when I did, tried to chalk it up to Area X.  _ It changes you, _ I’d heard, from whispers flying around at the base. At the time, I hadn’t been sure what they’d meant, but the farther we disappeared into the unfamiliar territory, the stranger I’d felt. It wasn’t a tangible sensation, this  _ otherness _ , but I’d have sworn up and down to its presence.  _ Alien _ , perhaps, was the right word.

 

Even now, following sixty or so years of intense study, no one has been able to uncover the origin of Area X. Claims to the location had popped up almost immediately following its “discovery” by technological conglomerate Goddard Futuristics (then the Wright-Goddard corporation,) but although the VP of the company at the time had managed to secure the rights to the land and everything inside the invisible border that came with it, and despite the best efforts of a global corporate giant with access to nearly all of the world’s best and brightest, there still has not been a singular consensus as to just why or how an enormous stretch of coast and wilderness had, overnight, transformed into a forbidding expanse from which very few returned, once they had made the decision to venture inside.

 

Hopefully, the four of us were to add to that number.

 

🙜

 

I say  _ very few returned _ from Area X for a couple of reasons, most grounded of which is the fact that yes, it is true that there have been members of previous expeditions-- we are the twelfth mission, codename  _ Hephaestus _ \-- who have crossed back over the border, alive. However,  _ alive _ has not, in every case, translated to ‘lived a long and happy life after the fact;’ in fact, I don’t think I could come up with one such example if you were to press me, even if my life was hanging in the balance.   
The other reason I say very few returned-- and I admit in advance, it’s a bit fanciful-- is the lack of a single Goddard-sponsored-and-provided expedition combination journal/manual making it back out. It might just be the musical theater in me, but there’s something about a  _ journal _ that suggests the most telling thoughts, the most intimate moments, even if those moments are just “the communications officer smells and I am beginning to suspect he is refusing to bathe on purpose.” Each member of every expedition had been equipped with a standard-issue book, bound in soft brown leather, with a hundred or so fresh cream pages-- waterproof, of course-- for logging our individual experiences during the mission. We were not allowed electronics, as Area X interfered with most devices of this type, and we were told back at base not to share our entries with each other, as it may introduce bias into our findings. On this, I am still not convinced, as even now, I don’t see how any of us could have truly been unbiased. Except, perhaps, for the anthropologist-- her unique architecture made it such so that she didn’t need to write her thoughts in a journal if she didn’t like, though I had seen an identical book to mine lingering among her things. 

I didn’t know much about the anthropologist beyond what I had learned from the slim personnel file I received to complement my leadership position, so I wasn’t sure if she would be capable of transmitting information across long distances, or even if Area X was somehow hindering her ability to do so. All I was sure of was, that, unlike the psychologist’s routine mutterings as he scrawled illegibly in the privacy of his own tent, or the biologist’s loopy scribbling in the rare moments he was quiet-- he might have been drawing comics for all I knew; I never asked-- the anthropologist never once touched her book, at least not in my presence.

 

Speaking of tents-- I decided then and there we’d make camp for the night. It was getting dark, and although there was certainly a part of me that wanted to explore the gaping maw mere meters away, it made us all uneasy enough that I figured we’d work better as a team if we went in by daylight. So we made our camp, and crawled into our respective tents, and tried not to think about things that could go bump in the night. 

 

We’d already had several encounters thus far; nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but certainly situations dangerous enough to get one or more of us killed. The psychologist had placed himself into an...interesting predicament involving some fungal spores and one of his matches, the biologist had nearly drowned after falling through what  _ seemed _ like solid ground, and though I had no proof of it, I could have sworn to seeing a vine reach out of its own accord as if to grab one of us and pull them back into its crushing embrace. Often, in the evening, I found myself watching out of the corner of my eye for such a movement, and constantly glanced downward to check that the tingling around my ankle was just that: a feeling.

 

Throughout all this, the anthropologist floated, seemingly above such mortal mistakes. Sometimes I got the feeling that she had a private laugh or two at our expense. Still, she seemed to get on quite well with the biologist at least, so for the time being I wasn’t too concerned about team dynamics.

 

If I am being hard on the anthropologist, it is only because she was the one who at the time I did not feel like I understood. I would later come to find out that my other two expedition members were not as straightforward as I had believed them to be, and that this would be cause for many a concern-- but at the time of coming across the hole and its sunken steps, it was the anthropologist who I did not fully trust, for it was the anthropologist who, at her core, seemed like she might relate more to Area X than any of the rest of us.

 

I was wrong.

 

But more on that later.

 

The morning brought the chattering of birds whose species was completely unknown to me. If the biologist knew, he did not share, though the calls seemed to pique his interest. I mentioned earlier that we were not allowed electronic devices, and this directive did extend to the biologist. He had, however, managed to secure an analog audio recorder, of the type that may have once been used for interviews, and fiddled with it now in an attempt to capture the calls on tape. Not wanting to disturb him, I looked at the anthropologist, but she was focused on retrieving something from her tent. I looked for the psychologist, and with a start realized he was nowhere to be seen. I checked and double-checked, before alerting the other two, not wanting to provide them with unnecessary stress, or to give them cause to doubt my competence, but each successive glance confirmed that the psychologist had either suddenly become an expert in military camouflage, or that he had disappeared. The glances the biologist and the anthropologist gave each other as I explained the situation to them did nothing to alleviate my concern.

 

We spent the better part of the morning looking for the psychologist, avoiding the massive hole in the ground-- which, as the day went on, began to look more and more like a sunken tower, primed for an attack-- on the sliver of hope that the psychologist had not wandered down into there. Eventually, however, Occam’s Razor prevailed, and the three of us found ourselves once again standing nervously at its edge. The tower was simultaneously enormous and crushing, and could have measured anywhere from tens of meters to several football fields across. Its walls were stone, but clearly of a natural vein; their rugged surface threatening to tear at our skin if we got too close. The spiral steps descending from the surface seemed to have no end as we peered down into the abyss. Was that shifting of gray shapes movement, far below, or merely our overactive imaginations? The tower’s very existence was disorienting, and I tried to ignore the twinge in my stomach as I pretended not to notice the anthropologist taking the biologist’s hand. 

 

It is never a fun experience to feel alone.

 

Still, none of us were here for fun, and I told myself that I certainly wasn’t going to gain my fellow crewmates’ respect or admiration by lamenting my lack of fellow companionship, and certainly not by losing the psychologist, and steeled myself for the descent.

**Author's Note:**

> find me @justasmalltownai


End file.
